Film will place its money on Monopoly

Hasbro, the company behind the hits “Transformers” and “G.I. Joe” and the flop “Battleship,” has signed a deal with independent production and finance company Emmett/Furla Films to make movies based on the board games Hungry Hungry Hippos and Monopoly and the toy Action Man.

Rhode Island-headquartered Hasbro, which has a film production office at the Universal Pictures lot, announced the three-picture deal last week and confirmed that the first movie will be “Monopoly,” which the two companies hope to start production on in 2013.

Emmett/Furla principal Randall Emmett confirmed that the other two properties covered by the deal are Action Man and Hungry Hungry Hippos.

Action Man is a British toy that launched in the 1960s based on Hasbro’s American hit, G.I. Joe.

Hungry Hungry Hippos, which debuted in 1978, is a game in which players compete with plastic hippos to swallow marbles off of a board. Emmett/Furla plans to make it into an animated movie for children.

Monopoly was previously in development at Universal, where Ridley Scott was producing the picture. He will still produce, along with Emmett/Furla.

In an earlier interview, Emmett said he plans to make all three properties into family movies with broad appeal and that he was not put off by the commercial failure of “Battleship” in May.

“Everything is about how you approach it in price,” he said. “We’re excited to make these movies in budget ranges where we are comfortable.”

Though the Hasbro pictures will be expensive for an independent company, Emmett said he hopes to spend less than $100 million on each of them.

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